TOAD Talk: Jake Conway

In 1990 a doctor from Anderson, Indiana published a short paper in the Journal of the American Medical Association. The paper reached some startling conclusions. And, no, this wasn’t some small-town quack proposing a new cure for the common cold. In fact, the doctor wasn’t even writing about new developments in medicine; he was writing about a discovery in the history of art. You see, one day this doctor, Dr. Frank Lynn Meshberger, was taking a second look at one of the most famous works of art in the Western world, Michelangelo’s magnificent frescoes on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican, when he noticed something that, for reasons that remain unclear to me, no one in the 478 years since the Sistine Chapel’s ceiling had been completed had ever seemed to notice.

But let’s put the doctor and his discovery aside for now, and take a moment to try to understand this exceptional work of art. Originally built between 1473 and 1481 by Sixtus IV, the Pope from whom the chapel takes its name, the Sistine Chapel is located inside the official papal residence in the Vatican and is the site of various VIP religious functions and ceremonies for the Catholic Church. It’s the place where they pick the next Pope. But its claim to fame really is its decoration, specifically the frescoes that adorn the walls and ceiling. The ceiling frescoes of the Sistine Chapel were commissioned in 1508 by a later pope, Pope Julius II, for a brash 33-year old up-and-coming Italian artist named Michelangelo Buonarotti. Michelangelo was coming off the fame of his sculpture, David, which he famously carved out of a single block of marble. He was cocky, but this assignment would have been high stakes even for him. As a young boy in Florence, Michelangelo apprenticed as a painter, but he saw himself in later years as more of a sculptor, which is perhaps one reason why he hesitated before taking on the Sistine Chapel commission. In any event, he didn’t really have a choice. When the Pope calls, you answer.

The ceiling took nearly five years to finish. Michelangelo kept much of his work a secret, not even letting the Pope see what he was up to. The results are some of the finest paintings of the Italian Renaissance. Art historians have described walking into the chapel as like being inside of a jewel box. When you first see it from the ground looking up, the ceiling is almost a geometrical abstraction. Soon after, it resolves, and you see bright brushes of color, pinks, oranges, yellows and blues, in an irregular but still mathematical pattern. Then, finally, you start to make out the figures. These are deeply human scenes. Perhaps no artist better explained how we are embodied in the world than Michelangelo. Even these figural representations, which are floating on the ceiling, have a materiality to them. They almost look sculpted out of paint.

The entire ceiling represents a kind of sensory overload but there is logic and order to it. You can see nine panels or compartments, which tell the story of Genesis chronologically. The first three scenes show the creation of the world: God separating light from darkness, God creating the sun and moon, God creating fish and the creatures in the sea. The second three tell the story of God creating Adam, God creating Eve, The Temptation, the Fall of Man and the Expulsion from the Garden of Eden. The last three tell the story of Noah and the Flood. It’s worth pointing out that the entire ceiling project was conceived altogether; it was meant to represent a unified whole. The frescoes tell the story of a singular vision, an entire worldview, a cosmos.

Legend has it that Michelangelo, who was good at creating legends, painted the whole ceiling himself. He likely did have help from assistants in preparing scaffolding and mixing paints, but restoration efforts have given support to the notion that this was the work of just two hands. If it is true, it is an astounding finding. The project of painting the entire ceiling would have been a superhuman feat. The ceiling is 134 feet long and 44 feet wide! Perhaps even more than extraordinary human ingenuity, it would have required extraordinary physical and mental endurance. To really understand what I mean, you have to understand a little bit about how this got made. The way fresco works is you take plaster, and then you apply it to the wall. Then you take your paint powders, mix them with water, set them against the wet plaster and then wait until it all dries. It’s called a fresco because you have to paint while the plaster is still wet or “fresh” [fresco means “fresh” in Italian]. This means that you can only paint little by little, one section of a painting at a time. You can’t do it all at once. The other important point is that, when you paint a fresco, you are painting directly onto the surface of the work, not on a canvas that you hang later. In the case of the Sistine Chapel, Michelangelo was painting directly on the ceiling, suspended in the air on wooden scaffolds.

Imagine that you were creating something for Ms. Mahoney’s art classes on paper or canvas. Now imagine doing that same drawing or illustration above your head, your neck craned, eyes straining, as your limbs push against gravity. Now imagine that you are 68 feet in the air—that’s how high the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel is. It’s really high! Then, remember that it’s not just one painting. There are nine panels of images of Biblical scenes and a whole supporting cast of sibyls, prophets and a bunch of other random nude and seminude characters. There are over 300 figures on the ceiling in total! But perhaps the biggest challenge of all has to do with scale and perspective. When you are painting on a ceiling, you can only really see the one section of ceiling you are working on, the one immediately above you. You can’t see the whole ceiling while you are painting, but you have to paint every detail of every figure in a way that is cohesive with and proportional to the whole plan. This would not be dissimilar to, say, trying to draw a topographic map for a large land area from inside of a canyon. It would have been exceedingly difficult, requiring surpassingly refined visual-spatial reasoning to get right.

The project took a toll on Michelangelo. His eye strain was so debilitating that when he came back down to the ground from the scaffolds he had to read letters or look at drawings holding them above his head far away. He had other complaints and anxieties, too. “My haunches are grinding into my guts, my poor ass strains to work as a counterweight, every gesture I make is blind and aimless,” he wrote to a friend in 1509, “My skin hangs loose below me, my spine's all knotted from folding over itself. I'm bent taut as a Syrian bow.” He added, “Because I'm stuck like this, my thoughts are crazy, perfidious tripe.” Okay, Michelangelo was starting to go crazy, but perhaps the real question is how could anyone have stayed sane doing what he was doing? He was painting images of God over and over again 68 feet up into the air, alone. Imagine Michelangelo, tired, wiping sweat and plaster bits from his face, trying to summon his arms up over his head for the thousandth time, getting literally waterboarded by paint dripping from the ceiling. And he did this for months at a time! Up there among the pendentives and spandrels, rope-tied to a small wooden platform, Michelangelo must have felt more than a little stuck. Five years is a lot of time to be alone with your thoughts. That’s a lot of time to be confronting your own demons. And Michelangelo was a pretty superstitious guy. All that time sneaking around morgues in Florence when he was a teenager must have come back to haunt him like the ghosts of so many nasty corpses.

To be clear, he had permission to enter the morgues. More than a decade before the whole Sistine Chapel business, when Michelangelo was in his teens, he spent a lot of time hanging out with the dead. We know from contemporaneous accounts that Michelangelo would frequent the morgue at a local church in Florence where he would perform dissections. He did numerous anatomical studies to understand bone structure, muscles, nerves and veins. There’s a reason why the small muscles of backs and the fine details of hands are so precise in his sculptures and paintings. He was studying the real thing. This also wouldn’t have been that unusual at the time. One of Michelangelo’s contemporaries, Leonardo da Vinci, famously dissected dozens of cadavers. In one famous experiment, da Vinci injected molten wax into a brain to determine the shape of its internal cavities. That all may sound a bit gruesome but you have to understand it in the context of the early 16th century. At the time, interest in anatomy (and science, more generally) went hand in hand with an interest in the arts. This kind of exploration was part of a broader intellectual and artistic movement, what we now call humanism, in which poets, writers, artists and scientists would use observation, critical analysis and creativity to better understand human nature. No surprises, then, that so many artists were scientists, and so many scientists were artists. The geniuses and virtuosos of the Renaissance did not limit themselves to a single field of intellectual inquiry or a single creative endeavor.
 
Which brings us back to our doctor. Remember Dr. Frank Lynn Meshberger? The one moonlighting as an art historian? Meshberger was looking at the frescoes of the Sistine Chapel when he zeroed in on one scene. The image he zeroed in on was The Creation of Adam, the fourth in the series of panels depicting Genesis, which make up the centerpiece of the entire Sistine Chapel ceiling. Like much of Michelangelo’s work, The Creation of Adam is a masterful description of the human form. It also includes one of the most iconic images of the entire Renaissance. Take a look. It’s an incredibly dynamic image. Adam is sprawled out, languid, voluptuous and beautiful, his left arm outstretched, awaiting God’s touch. God, the white-bearded human-like figure on the right just above Adam, is reaching out toward him, pointing at him, his finger not quite meeting Adam’s finger in a moment of movement and electricity, the spark of life about to be delivered, God creating Adam after his own likeness. Adam is stirring, his eyes already open, aware perhaps for the first time that he is being created in the image of God [“So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created He him.” Genesis 1:27].

At least, that is the standard art historical interpretation. Dr. Meshberger saw it a little differently. He was looking at the image of God and his entourage of angels or souls in The Creation of Adam, and he realized that the whole thing, the pink, flowy cape surrounding God and the floating angelic figures, taken together, looked uncannily familiar. When he started tracing the directional lines of the image, he stumbled upon something completely unmistakeable. You don’t need to be an expert in neuroanatomy to see it once you see it. It’s a brain.

You can trace the interior brain fold, the cingulate sulcus, from the hip of the angel in front of God, following across God’s shoulders and down God’s left arm. The flowing green robe is the vertebral artery at the base, twisting and turning around the articular process as it moves up the brainstem. The back of the angel extending laterally below God is the pons, and the angel's hip and leg represent the spinal cord. The pituitary stalk and gland are depicted by the leg and foot of the angel that extends below the base of the picture. And so on and so forth. I’m reading Meshberger's report almost verbatim. If you think all this is a bunch of baloney, a cheap Da Vinci Code-style plot twist, I’ll let you know that when I was researching this this weekend, I texted the image to my father who is a neurologist of nearly 40 years. He called me almost instantly and was like “that is a brain.” If you still don’t believe me, take a look under your seats. You will find a bunch of drawings and illustrations. Figures 1 and 3 were created by a medical illustrator. Figures 2 and 4 are tracings of the Sistine Chapel. Figure 7 is from a random website I found. It maps Meshberger’s findings clearly onto an image of a lateral cross-section of the brain.

Was it an encoded message? A playful motif inspired by Michelangelo’s former studies of anatomy? Why would Michelangelo include this unmistakable symbol in his work? Dr. Meshberger sees The Creation of Adam as more than just God infusing Adam with the “breath of life.” He sees it as God giving Adam a mind, consciousness, the powers of reasoning, the ability to think and to choose, to “plan the best and highest,” and “try all things received.” God’s hand stretches out through the frontal cortex of the cape, the part of the brain that deals with planning and executive function. According to Meshberger’s reading of the painting, God is transmitting intelligence into man through the “synapse” of the finger.

This analysis is stunning, but it does leave something to be desired. I think The Creation of Adam is about more than just consciousness or divine creation. As we all come to know every morning when we wake up, the brain isn’t just the seat of daily thought and decision making. It’s also the source of our dreams. Maybe, then, through the “synapses” of the fingers, God is dreaming Adam into being, dreaming him into the world as something beautiful and good and human, and this is all, in turn, being dreamed into reality by Michelangelo, the synapses of his paintbrush transmitting his extraordinary creativity and prodigious intellect onto the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, leaving us with something splendid, hopeful and universal.

Ultimately, The Creation of Adam is a reminder that our greatest creative achievements happen when we combine science and art, when we bring together our faculties of emotion and reason—mind, body, and
soul, what make us powerfully, undeniably human. Michelangelo wouldn’t have known anything about the science of dreams. In the 16th century, dreams would likely have been understood as symbols of the supernatural or revelations from God. Regardless, I am pretty sure that even if he didn’t understand the science of dreams, he would have understood what it meant to imagine. So, about the whole floating God-brain thing? Maybe there’s something else going on. Maybe Michelangelo is winking at us from somewhere up in the heavens, trying to tell us that imagination is the masterpiece of a God-given brain, that in this world we are most alive when we incorporate cosmic dreams into what we think and know.

Thank you.